“Mary smeared shit with the skill of a Zen calligrapher.”
The 30 x 30cm Project, in Marfa Texas, functions as a “collaboration between Arber & Sons Editions and visiting artists-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation”. The essay on John Beech’s “Container Series” was written by Mary Walling Blackburn.
An alternate title is provided above.
http://www.30×30cmproject.com/volume6.html
In 1992, Professor Kristin Gager, who was then specializing in the history of French orphanages, brought my attention to “The Peasants of Languedoc” by Emannuel Le Roy La Durie. The following paragraph from Page 161 surfaces in the Beech article 15 years later.
“The third category [of signature]… is the simple sign or mark, which was evidence of complete illiteracy. It might be geometric or a “trade mark”- for an artisan “a rough hammer”, for example; for the peasants; a conical plowshare (reille) or rake. Very often the mark was a cross or else, at the lowest level, a meaningless scrawl or blob of ink.”
